Adjacent Islands/Islas Adyacentes Chapbook by Nicole Cecilia Delgado and DoubleCross Press
“Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book art is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked in its pages and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands/islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language).
Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls ‘camping books,’ adjacent islands/islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where ‘communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.’ Call it book art as counterarchive.
A co-publication of DoubleCross Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and La Impresora.“ - DoubleCross Press.
adjacent islands/islas adyacentes was translated by Urayoán Noel.
5.75” x 4.5” x 0.25”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
Nicole Cecilia Delgado (she/her) is a poet, translator, and book artist. Her latest book of poems, Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora), explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico’s ongoing financial crisis. Her recent pamphlet A Mano/By Hand (Ugly Duckling Presse) is an essay on the attempt “to live with dignity, to achieve real quality of life, to create community in the process and find joy doing so” in a life lived in and through poetry. Her work has been translated into English, Catalan, Polish, German, Galician, and Portuguese. With the poet Amanda Hernández, she currently directs and develops La Impresora, a poetry press and risograph print shop dedicated to small-scale editorial work and allocating resources to support local independent publishing, and from which they also organize the Independent and Alternative Book Fair in Puerto Rico (FLIA PR).
DoubleCross Press is a publisher of handmade books of poetry and poetics. With an eye toward artist book studio practices and spaces, and toward the materials and structures of contemporary and historic hand-bookmaking, they produce physical manifestations of their writers' language. They publish poetry chapbooks, essays on book arts and book culture, poetry journals, and other materials exploring the boundaries of poetry, poetics, and artist books.
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